Study: Many records not online

Federal agencies have dragged their feet on implementing 10-year-old law that requires them to use the Internet to make government documents easily available, a new study says.

The result is the public is blocked from easier access to information, the report says, and the cost of answering information requests is driven up.

The study by the National Security Archive, for official release today, found widespread failure among federal agencies to follow the Electronic Freedom of Information Act amendments that took effect in 1997. The changes constituted some of the most significant modernizations of the original 40-year-old law that first guaranteed citizens the right to government information.

"Federal agencies are flunking the online test and keeping us in the dark," said Thomas Blanton, director of the independent, non-governmental Washington-based research institute. The study was funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which focuses on journalism.

The archive's review of all 91 federal agencies with chief FOIA officers, along with 58 components of agencies (like the Air Force within the Department of Defense) that handle more than 500 documents a year, found:

Just 22 percent of federal agencies and components fully followed the law and posted on the Web all the required categories of documents (agency opinions and orders; frequently requested records; policy statements; staff guidance).

Just over one-third of agencies and components provided an index of their records, as required, to help locate documents.

Only a quarter of agencies and components provided online forms for submitting FOIA requests.

Many of the record-related Web links that do exist are wrong or missing. One FOIA fax number actually rang in the maternity ward of a military base hospital, Blanton said.

A few agencies bucked the trend and showed the benefits of using the Internet, particularly the Education Department and the NASA, the study found.

NASA is a prime example of effective use of the Web, Blanton said.

The agency posts comprehensive guidance on FOIA for visitors, links all their component FOIA Web sites, and also has posted many documents on the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, a tragedy that had drawn many inquiries for information.

"They don't get FOIA requests on Columbia anymore, because it's up on the Web," Blanton said. If an agency would follow the law, "it dramatically lowers the cost for government, not just for FOIA but for all the handling of records."

The study singled out as particularly egregious offenders the Department of Veterans Affairs, one of the departments that gets the most requests for information; the Department of Defense, particularly the Air Force; the Interior Department; the Office of the Director of National Intelligence; and the Small Business Administration.

The costs of handling FOIA - estimated at $319 million in 2005 - could be sharply curtailed if agencies relied more on the Web, since frequently requested documents already would be public and electronic records could more easily be shared, Blanton said. Backlogs also could be reduced.

An even bigger cost-savings could be found if the government chose not to make so much material secret in the first place, Blanton said. That cost was estimated at $7.7 billion in 2005, not including the CIA, according to a report on the cost of security classification activities by the Information Security Oversight Office, part of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

The failure to follow the law should be seen in a larger context of the federal government's tendency, exacerbated in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, to keep information out of public view, Blanton said. It would be best to focus on essential information that truly needs to be secret, and make the rest public, he said.

Blanton summarized that approach as "high fences around a real small yard."

Congress should share some of the blame for the failure of the law because it did not create any enforcement provisions for the law and did not vigorously oversee the agencies, he said.